A long way down

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Ar first glance you might think that A Long Way Down
could be about something akin to those chilling internet-based
suicide-pact clubs in Japan. It isn't. In this book, four diverse
characters meet by chance, not by intention. And though they do
form a kind of club, or pact, it is not one whose aim is to stiffen
their resolve to self-slaughter.

Suicide is not a new concern in Hornby's novels. Marcus, the
young hero of About a Boy, is traumatised by his mother's
attempt to kill herself. Her explanations seem inadequate, and
authentically so - words do tend to fail before the enormity of
despair. Except for a mystifying note, her suicide attempt is seen
mostly from the other characters' perspectives.

But the question still hung: why suicide? A Long Way
Down is the novel where Hornby explores this. His take on the
why of suicidal impulse includes hard questions such as how could
they do it, given children, spouses, parents? The spate of recent
suicides of well-known people has emphasised that mystery: people
who do kill themselves are (in sad, wondering hindsight)
demonstrated by their actions to have been as unreachable before as
unaccountable afterward.

Hornby never valorises suicide, never indulges the airheaded
romanticisings that are (paradoxically) a deadweight on attempts to
consider the subject clearly. It's a healthy contrast to the creepy
fetishism of Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, with
all that breathy eroticising of the physical details of the young
Lisbon sisters' deaths.

The very title demonstrates this. Hornby's dry sense of the
ridiculous forbids such flights and flirts; his feet are firmly
earthed. For instance, he always keeps the perspective that those
left behind are left without any answers and a burden of grief far
heavier and more perilous to mental health than that of a natural
bereavement.

A Long Way Down is a novel title that also shows the
nature of its story: there is a pun there, an ironic twist, but the
words themselves are a candid signpost to the exploration he
undertakes.

Hornby's individuals narrate their stories in their different
voices; taken together, they form a potent, interconnected
narrative. In refraining from using omniscient authorial commentary
he must use the characters' words to reveal themselves and each
other. A Long Way Down is not a letter or even a diary
form, more of a dramatic exposition, almost a Talking Heads
treatment. It reads extraordinarily well: it's one of those books
that make you forget appointments and ignore the phone.

Hornby's four suicidals meet by chance on New Year's Eve in
London on the roof of a high building popularly and grimly known as
Toppers' House. They are Martin, the disgraced TV presenter sacked
and jailed for having had sex with a 15-year-old girl; Maureen, the
50ish single mother of a profoundly disabled 19-year-old man; Jess,
the chaotic, bratty 17-year-old daughter of a New Labour junior
minister; and JJ, the 30ish rock musician, discouraged and
disillusioned.

Martin's voice opens the novel. He has the prideful, urbane
articulateness of the highly (but shallowly) educated upper middle
class: his list of Pros and Cons betrays his inability or
unwillingness to convey that he really knows what he is doing. He
speaks of suicide as being "my Sydney". (Britons often talk of
Australia as if it were in a kind of escapist's fifth dimension.)
He is more defended than the others, smartly nihilistic and only
vulnerable in what he shows unintentionally. He makes you think of
a quieter Svidrigailov.

The two males are more educated yet no wiser than the two
females. There are echoes of High Fidelity in JJ, and he
is none the worse a character for that. If there is one thread that
runs through all Hornby's novels it is his benign obsession with
contemporary popular music. Music forms more than a backdrop to
JJ's story; it unfolds as a strong argument for life.

Maureen's voice is uneducated but not foolish. She is someone
whose life has been so deprived, so burdened that you could pity
her if her narrative were not so simply dignified; what she has to
go through is more than the average person could endure. Hornby's
perspective on the dystopic post-Thatcherite Britain teeters
dangerously here, but he manages to make Maureen real, not a
compassion lay-figure.

The ground gets shakier with Jess, who is sometimes cartoonish,
as garrulous as Vicky Pollard (from Little Britain) and only
marginally better educated. But many 17-year-olds are indeed angry
drug-and-alcohol bingers who hate their parents. As the daughter of
a Labour politician her education has been sacrificed to principle
at the local comprehensive sink, yet even she is a believable and
rounded character by the end.

Someone once said that we see a person fall, but we don't see
the struggle that preceded it. In A Long Way Down, Hornby
shows us the struggles, and tries to let something other than death
have the last word.